Why Alexei Navalny returned to face death in Putin’s Russia

Patriot, a posthumous memoir and collection of diary entries, records the Russian dissident’s brave career and dark final days

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The question that persists with Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in a prison camp in February, is: having managed to escape his homeland, what on earth persuaded him to return? A constant and effective critic of the tyranny Vladimir Putin has since the 2000s imposed on the Russian people, Navalny barely survived a deadly assassination attempt while on a domestic flight in 2020. He was poisoned with the nerve-agent Novichok, the same as was used in the Salisbury attack in 2018. Only through the intervention of a team of German medical specialists, and his rapid evacuation to a specialist unit in a Berlin hospital, did Navalny survive. The Kremlin had every right to assume that if he pulled through, he would never return home.
But Putin and his security apparatchiks hadn’t bargained on Navalny’s commitment to exposing their corruption and brutality. Navalny immediately made it clear that, once he’d made a full recovery, he would return to Russia and resume his campaign. It was an extraordinary decision, and one that would cost him his life. For, as Navalny recalls in Patriot, his gripping posthumous account of his long confrontation with Putin, within minutes of landing in Moscow in January 2021, he was detained by the Russian security forces, then confined to a series of penal colonies. He would die at camp FKU IK-3, nicknamed “Polar Wolf”. This book, which he had been writing since 2020, has now been published by his widow Yulia, and their fellow anti-corruption activists. 
Navalny was repeatedly asked, as he lay recovering in Germany, whether he intended to return to his homeland. “What a dumb question,” he told Yulia, who was handling media queries on his behalf. “Of course I will.” By this stage in his two-decade career of dissidence and activism, he had convinced himself that international notoriety would ultimately keep him safe. “The better known I am,” he wrote, “the more difficult it will be for them to kill me.” Given the Kremlin’s complicity in neutralising other prominent critics, such as Boris Nemtsov, a close acquaintance of Navalny’s who was shot dead in 2015 just 200 metres from the Kremlin, Navalny’s confidence was woefully misplaced.
He only acknowledged what was going to happen in one of his final diary entries, from January this year, just a few weeks before the prison authorities announced that while undertaking daily exercise, he’d mysteriously collapsed and died. Writing on January 9, Navalny had a chilling premonition, saying that the idea that Putin would be satisfied “with the simple fact of having me in a cell in the far north” was “naive”. And in his final diary entry, dated the following week – the third anniversary of his return to Russia, a month before the announcement of his death – he explained that he returned because “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.” 
The first half of Patriot – compelling, impressive, only occasionally a mite self-indulgent – gives us a standard memoiristic account of Navalny’s political development. Born in 1976, as a schoolboy he feels a growing disillusionment with the Soviet regime; after the USSR collapses, he’s frustrated with the failure of Russia to adopt proper democratic institutions. 
These early chapters have a certain poignancy. In his account of his efforts to expose the rampant corruption within Putin’s dictatorship, for example, his enthusiasm is so infectious it almost encourages you to believe his campaign might prevail. Having become disillusioned with the inability of Russia’s established opposition parties to make headway against Putin’s United Russia movement, Navalny, briefly a corporate lawyer, transfers his efforts to exposing the rampant corruption within the country’s elite. The Anti-Corruption Foundation, which he set up to expose the venality of Putin’s regime, causes the Kremlin repeated and deep embarrassment, revealing (for instance) that Putin’s press secretary has been spotted wearing a $620,000 Swiss watch (then £415,000) at a recent wedding – at a time when one in five Russians are living below the poverty line of $160 (£123) a month.
Navalny’s devotion to the cause of exposing Russian corruption is so strong that, even as he lies in a German hospital, his team of anti-corruption investigators is undertaking a huge research project about Putin’s private Gelendzhik Palace on the Black Sea, examining how the Russian leader finances his family, his amusements, his hobbies and his mistresses – details of which are subsequently published on Navalny’s various social-media outlets. Unsurprisingly, a few months later, Navalny finds that his flight back to Moscow, which is packed with foreign media, is diverted from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, where a large crowd of well-wishers has gathered, to another airport. The dissident is immediately detained on arrival, and taken away. He will never taste freedom again. 
The second half concentrates on the meticulous diaries Navalny manages to keep during his incarceration, a remarkable achievement given the brutal conditions in which he’s often held. There’s a deep pathos to this part of the book: the reader knows how his anti-Putin stand will end. In the early days of his incarceration, his spirits are buoyed by the prospect he may even be released, especially when global bodies such as the European Court on Human Rights attempt to intervene on his behalf. But the authorities seek to crush his spirit by dispatching him to ever more punitive regimes, culminating in his final confinement in the Arctic Circle. At one point, when the prison authorities deliberately try to break him by cooking his favourite foods while he’s on hunger strike, his narrative reads more like a scene from Solzhenitsyn. 
After his death, Navalny’s body was withheld by the Russian authorities for weeks. His eventual funeral in March this year, despite official warnings and a heavy police presence, saw thousands of mourners attend, chanting anti-Putin slogans. Months on, as the dictatorship continues unabated, those ordinary Russians can only hope that Navalny’s sacrifice will prove, one day, not to have been in vain.
Patriot is published by Bodley Head at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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